Course 2: Your First GMO

Creating a GMO is as easy as cooking an egg. In this project we will produce simple transgenic organisms by transforming plasmids, tiny circles of DNA, into live E. coli bacteria. The resulting microbes are useful mainly as a DNA factory, growing and replicating more DNA for us to extract and manipulate in the lab. This same technique will allow us to introduce small genetic devices into bacteria quickly and cheaply.